


I Gotta Wear Shades

by kiki-eng (kiki_eng)



Category: St Trinian's (2007 2009)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-06
Updated: 2012-08-06
Packaged: 2017-11-11 13:11:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/478903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiki_eng/pseuds/kiki-eng
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Hi," Polly says, again, and Kelly smiles up at her.  </p>
<p>"Hi," she says back, again.  Then she turns and burrows into Polly's side, tucks her face under Polly's chin and throws a leg over her side.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Gotta Wear Shades

**Author's Note:**

  * For [language_escapes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/language_escapes/gifts).



> Many thanks to readbystarlight for beta reading. Thanks also to sobluethesky for helping out a little.

Polly’s going to have to wash her hands later, before she goes to bed. She’s got this thing right now where she’s trying to keep all of the paints and inks and powders away from her sheets to begin with, so that there isn’t anything that needs to be gotten out of them later. So she’s lying on her front on top of the covers and facing the foot of the bed, away from where her white sheet’s folded over her blue blanket, exposed. The sleeves of her pajama top are rolled up over her elbows so that she doesn’t get dust on her cuffs. She knows it’s clinging to her fingers.

She’s got her lower legs at ninety degrees to her torso, ankles crossed in the air, and her weight braced on an elbow when Kelly comes back from the party and she feels the bed shift before Kelly’s arm comes to rest on Polly’s back and she plasters herself against Polly’s side. 

"C. K. Dexter Haven," she croons softly into Polly's ear, the drunk James Stewart to Polly's sober Cary Grant, stringing out the syllables choppily so that they're not really connected to each other anymore. "C. K. Dex-ter Ha-ven," she says, and then says again, stretching the "a" in Haven out so long that Polly thinks that she may have gotten stuck.

Polly grins. "Hi," she says, softly, when Kelly finishes. It’s late at night - early morning, really - and the dormitory’s mostly dimmed, hushed.

“Hi,” Kelly says back, matching her. She flips onto her back and reaches up to tangle her fingers in Polly's hair and trace the bends that the elastics Polly uses during the day leave in it.

"What are you doing?" Kelly whispers.

She’s just playing, really, sketching out the band of Bogie’s fedora in charcoal right now. "Sketching," she says. She blows the dust from the charcoal off of the page and over the edge of her bed before she turns a little to face Kelly and flips the drawing so that Kelly can see it.

Kelly reaches up and takes the sketchbook from her, then stretches her arms out over her head a little ridiculously and looks at it. "Are you almost done?" she asks.

"Almost," Polly says, and Kelly nods and draws her arms down again, passes the book back to Polly.

"I'll wait," she says and Polly goes back to her sketch. She finishes drawing Humphrey Bogart’s hat, smudges some of the dust with her fingers, blending it, and thinks about adding Kelly in later, sketching her out like something from a noir film. _She'd look good like that_ , Polly thinks, _she'd like that._

Polly finishes what she was doing when Kelly arrived and closes her sketchbook. She might go back to it later, might add in Kelly after all, but she’s done for now, so she crawls down the length of her bed just a little more so that she can put her sketchbook and charcoal down without hurting them, without breaking the hush of the dormitory, then crawls back to where she was and turns to Kelly.

"Hi," Polly says, again, and Kelly smiles up at her. 

"Hi," she says back, again. Then she turns and burrows into Polly's side, tucks her face under Polly's chin and throws a leg over her side.

"How was your night?" Polly asks, laughing a little.

"This," Kelly says, angling her head so that her breath’s hitting Polly directly in the face, "is the beer breath of victory." Polly flinches a little and Kelly angles her face back down, so that her breath ghosts across Polly's pajama top instead.

“You smell like the brewery.”

"I've figured out who the prankster is." Kelly tells her, smug.

"What? Really?" 

Pranks are pretty common place at St. Trinian’s but they’re usually pretty simple and uninspired - kid’s stuff, like whoopee cushions. There’s been a steady stream of pranks this year that haven’t been like that at all. They’ve had style and flair and, well, elegance. Whoever the prankster is they’re _good_. Polly has been trying to catch them for weeks, randomly moving the cameras about and making charts, trying to figure out who it is. She doesn't like not know things. Knowledge is power. 

(She also doesn't like the sneaking feeling under her skin that she could be next.) 

None of the pranks have been random. They’ve been _personalised_. ‘Prankster’ almost doesn’t seem like the right word for them; whoever they are - they’re an _artist_. Polly’s not keen on the part where they’ve been an anonymous one, though. She likes _knowing things_.

"Yes," Kelly says, and shushes Polly needlessly before twisting around so that her mouth is closer to Polly's ear. "It's Peaches," she whispers, and suddenly things are clicking into place and Polly’s remembering Peaches’ smile and she needs to smack herself for having ruled her out. She should know better than to underestimate people and she should _absolutely_ know better than to underestimate any St. Trinian’s girl.

"What's the plan?" she asks.

"The beginning of another beautiful friendship," Kelly says, and Polly smiles.

“Do you want to sleep here tonight?” she asks Kelly. “We can make plans and you can tell me how you sussed it out and gloat a little?” 

Polly’s pretty sure that’s a smirking silence. 

“You want to know everything I know,” Kelly says, and Polly can _hear_ the smirk now.

Kelly knows her a little too well, or maybe just knows her - full stop. So they both know that’s not precisely true; there’s stuff Kelly knows that Polly isn’t really interested in and Polly’s asking, in part, for the same reason that you ask a maths geek to work through a problem for you that you can solve on your own - they might know something you don’t that gets them the answer faster. Kelly does that, sometimes.

Polly says, “Yeah,” because Kelly knows what she means, and a beat later, “How can I live vicariously through your exploits if you don’t tell me about them?”

She can feel Kelly shake against her with silent laughter. “I do tell the best bedtime stories,” she says.

“The very best,” Polly says, because she does. 

“I think you need to wash your teeth and I need to brush my hands first, though,” Kelly says, and Polly snickers.

“Quiet, you. You know I’m brilliant.”

“Yeah,” Polly says; she really is. She’s going to be head girl some day. “Come on,” Polly says, “let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" by Timbuk 3.


End file.
